A table that describes a character set for a particular speaking language. It is used by the operating system to display and print a language properly. The code page defines 256 characters based on the 256 possible combinations in a single byte. For most code pages, the first 128 characters conform to the ASCII standard.
Following are commonly used code pages. The DOS code pages are still used in a DOS window in Windows. See
ASCII and
Unicode.
ANSI/WINDOWS AND ISO CODE PAGES
(ISO and ANSI/Windows are not identical.)
ANSI/
Language Name Windows ISO
WESTERN EUROPE:
English
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
Norwegian
Swedish
Basque
Catalan Latin 1 1252 8859-1
CENTRAL/EASTERN EUROPE:
Polish
Hungarian
Croatian
Czech
Albanian
Romanian
Slovak
Slovene Latin 2 1250 8859-2
Arabic Arabic 1256 8859-6
Greek Greek 1253 8859-7
Hebrew Hebrew 1255 8859-8
Latvian
Lithuanian Baltic 1257 8859-13
Russian Cyrillic 1251 8859-5
Thai Thai 874 8859-11
Turkish Turkish 1254 8859-9
Vietnamese Vietnamese 1258 8859-1
DOS CODE PAGES/OEM CODE PAGES
(Three prefixes are used for DOS code
pages; for example: code page 858 is
CP 858, IBM 858 or OEM 858)
Language Name Code Page #
Western Europe 1st PC 437
Western Europe Latin 1 850
Western Europe
with Euro Multilingual 858
Central/
Eastern Europe Latin 2 852
French Canadian French Canadian 863
Greek Greek 737
Icelandic Icelandic 861
Portuguese Portuguese 860
Russian Cyrillic 855
Turkish Turkish 857
Danish
Finnish
Norwegian
Swedish Nordic 865